Facebook’s App Platform

One of Facebook’s biggest strengths is its web platform, but with the evolution of hardware-tied mobile app stores, that platform is slowly (very, very slowly) becoming irrelevant. Today, Facebook announced its App Center, presumably to compete more directly with the Play Market and the App Store. Aaron Brady, on the Facebook developers blog:

Today, we’re announcing the App Center, a new place for people to find social apps. The App Center gives developers an additional way to grow their apps and creates opportunities for more types of apps to be successful.

In the coming weeks, people will be able to access the App Center on the web and in the iOS and Android Facebook apps. All canvas, mobile and web apps that follow the guidelines can be listed. All developers should start preparing today to make sure their app is included for the launch.

This strategy has the potential to be very successful if Facebook can provide great development tools and design guidelines for making web-based apps that can run inside the Facebook app as well as on Facebook’s website. Whether Apple would be okay with that strategy, since it would basically be a trojan horse platform, I’m not sure. I would suspect not.